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Getting Started Selling Your Woodworking Projects

Whether you are looking for things to give as gifts to family and friends, or if you want make some money selling furniture or crafts, woodshop project are the perfect idea. You can start small with things like jewelry boxes and pencil holders or go big and build furniture for indoors and outdoors. Below we will show you how to get started in this business and how to begin selling the things you make.

Small Wooden Jewelry Box

Small woodworking pieces like jewelry boxes, carvings, and decorative shelves come in all sorts of types and complexities. There are designs for very simple items. If you want something more elegant, you can use different types of hardwood to improve the appearance of a simple project. If your skills at woodworking are more developed, you can design some more complicated boxes and shelves that are more unique and could be easier to sell. Another way to make a simple woodworking project appear to be unique is to use different types of wood veneer to decorate the outside. Veneer can be easy to work with as long as you have a sharp blade, a straight edge, and some glue.

Where to Sell Your Crafts

The best way to sell your craft ideas is to participate in local art shows and craft fairs. These types of fairs can be easy to showcase your small woodworking projects, but can also be time consuming. One of the positive things about craft fairs is that people typically attend these with the purpose of making purchases. Also, you can display your entire inventory so that buyers can see your workmanship with their own eyes rather than just a photograph. The downside is that craft fairs can be spread out and require driving to get to them, as well as a tent and tables to display your items. So while they are great for local events, they can be difficult to attend and reach a fairly limited number of people. Building a website is another way to showcase your craft projects. Websites can be difficult to set up if you are unfamiliar with it, and take a lot of work in order to get visitors to come to your site. Luckily, there are other places to sell your small crafts and projects on the web that doesn’t require you to create your own website. Etsy is a great website strictly for the purpose of individuals selling handmade arts and crafts to others. The etsy website contains things from woodworking projects to handmade jewelry and scrapbooking supplies and has well over one million individuals selling things. Using etsy is very simple. All you need to do is create an account, upload pictures and a description of the crafts you are selling and set a price. Since there are a lot of different sellers on etsy and some make the same types of crafts, you really need to set yourself out from the crowd to make your projects more visible and more appealing than others. A way to make your listings more appealing is to have quality photos of your projects. Do not use small cell phone pictures of your projects. Use a higher quality digital camera to take high-resolution images of your items. If you don’t have a good camera and you have a lot of projects to photograph, find a local photographer who can help and take the pictures for you. It may cost a little bit of money to have the photos taken, but if you sell a lot of the same item, it can really boost the appearance of your online listing and make you more money in the long run.

What woodshop projects to build?

So far we have talked about where to sell the things that you make, but haven’t talked about the different items that you can make. People tend to buy things depending on the season of the year. Around Christmas time, consumers are looking for things that are holiday oriented. Items like wooden candle holders or Christmas tree ornaments are great simple projects to make quickly and make a bunch of them. Other decorative items can be made for the holidays as well. Other crafts such as small shelves, wooden coasters, decorative tree houses, napkin rings, and children’s toys can be easily crafted and sold online. The only limit is your own imagination as to what you can create. One type of wood project that sells well is something that appears antique. It doesn’t have to be old, but only appear to be old. You can do this by using wood from pallets, or old buildings that are being torn down. Wooden barns are great sources of wood for many projects. With this old wood you can make picture frames, or other wall decorations with minimal effort. People like the rustic look to these things. You can add some paint and distress the paint if you use wood from pallets that appears too new. If you have a lot of barn wood, you can also just sell that as a raw material. Barn wood can be hard to come by for many craft makers and woodworkers, so providing that source could give you some income as well.

When building larger furniture, it is much more difficult to make a lot of money quickly. Each piece can take a long time to build and you are competing against many professional woodworkers and furniture makers. Companies mass produce their products, so it is very difficult to compete with them on price. If you can build your wood furniture and have it displayed in a furniture store, this would be the best way to try to sell it. Try to make a deal with the shop owner to pay them good commission on the works that they display for you and make things that you think will sell, which might not be the items that you want to build at first. Once you have developed a good working relationship with a seller, you can start to build more items that you may like and the retailer will likely display them for you as well.

Where to get plans

If you aren’t sure where to start at all, try searching the internet for free woodworking plans. There are websites all over which have these for free or for a small fee. It is a good idea to start with a plan or blueprint rather than just trying something on your own so you don’t make any mistakes. Once you are comfortable building things from the plans, you can start to customize the designs or make new ones. Whether you decide to use free plans or buy them, they are all about the same quality. We have found that the ones you purchase are usually more complete and give much more detail, but the free ones can work good as well. The big key to making a profit from woodworking is to just get out there and start building!